Popular threads blamed “the media” for people believing lies about voter fraud and vaccines.
But they conveniently ignore the massive disinformation campaigns by Trump and his allies.
And they provide cover for con artists undermining democracy and public health.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
Want to know why so many “just regular folks” think the 2020 election was stolen and why so many of those same people refuse to get the COVID vaccine?
According to the authors of a pair of viral Twitter threads from July and August, the answer is simple: It’s all the media’s fault.
Both threads tried to convey a righteous anger, channeled from the “real” salt-of-the-earth citizens, on whom the elites look down their noses. Both threads were spread by conservatives, anti-anti-Trumpers, and Intellectual Dark Web types who touted the diatribes as “mic drop” indictments of the pernicious mainstream media.
One of the authors, the pseudonymous podcaster “MartyrMade,” spoke for the “boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent.”
The other, tweeted by the Russian-British podcaster Konstantin Kisin, gave voice to the “normal person” who is “vaccine-hesitant.”
The common link between the two threads is the premise that “the people” (not only Americans) were betrayed by the “mainstream media” and can therefore not be blamed for believing in “grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories” — as one of the authors put it.
In the case of these two threads, the “grifters” and “scam artists” go unnamed, and at no point is the serially dishonest former President Donald Trump assigned any blame for making people believe things that are not true.
Conversely, the media’s biases, arrogance, and missteps are so evil and destructive, according to the authors, that “normal” people can’t rationally parse the news, and therefore can’t be held responsible for believing in things for which there is absolutely no evidence.
It’s an ironic formulation.
As a populist defense of the people who incorrectly believe Trump’s Big Lie about voter fraud — as well as any number of conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccines — it also ultimately infantilizes them as blameless lemmings without personal agency.
The massive popularity of these “megathreads” demonstrates the authors’ ability to tap into a shared sense of anger and disillusionment. But their real value is to solidify the narrative that these “normal people” are, in fact, victims of a cruel “regime.”
Greenwald praised MartyrMade’s viral thread as “one of the most insightful analyses yet published explaining the animating convictions underlying the MAGA movement.” He also boasted that Trump recommended the thread by name during a Conservative Political Action Conference speech and that Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to reading it aloud in its entirety.
MartyrMade acknowledges early in his thread that “Hannity or Breitbart” convinced people of “theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc.” but waves off any concerns because the people “aren’t particularly attached to them.” It’s also the only mention of right-leaning media peddling misinformation in the megathread.
Instead, the thread then goes into outrage hyperdrive, playing all the hits: Obamagate, the Steele dossier, the Russia-collusion “hoax.”
For this, Martyrmade says, the people “hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.”
The people have been red-pilled and now understand “the corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime” — seemingly a nominal update to the all-purpose anti-Trump institutions of the “Deep State.”
From there, the thread plays fast and loose with the facts, to put it kindly.
“They showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13 million more votes than in 2016, 10m million more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.”
They knew what, exactly? That a fully expected “red mirage” was followed by a “blue wave” as a result of mail-in ballots being counted separately?
The thing is, the answer doesn’t really matter, because the ominous tones of conspiracy theorizing are enough to win the hearts and minds of the people whose biases his thread confirms.
Kilin makes some fair points, particularly regarding the hypocrisy of some medical experts encouraging mass protests while simultaneously dismissing any risk that might be attached to large groups of people loudly congregating. He also correctly cites the media’s inexplicable lionization of Andrew Cuomo’s leadership as a near industry-wide dereliction of duty.
And both Kilin and MartyrMade are almost certainly correct in supposing that a laptop full of compromising photos and documents owned by Donald Trump Jr. wouldn’t have been treated with kid gloves by the mainstream media as Hunter Biden’s was.
But gesturing at half-truths about the media’s failures doesn’t make up for the fact that each thread does not address in any meaningful way the tsunami of blatant lies from any number of right-leaning media outlets. The threads also impart on “the normal people” absolutely no responsibility for being taken in by crude propaganda and opportunistic charlatans profiting from their gullibility.
And neither thread puts on any blame on the most influential source of bad information in American life: Donald Trump.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images
The elephant in the room
Let’s be very clear, the “corporate media” has indeed done damage to its reputation many times over by embracing a rushed narrative before conducting any basic reporting.
I might be a member of the “corporate media,” but I’ve frequently called out the media’s missteps — including the Jussie Smollett and Covington Catholic reporting fiascoes as well as Cuomo’s free pass from skeptical national press coverage — all of which were cited in the megathreads to indict the media.
If the two “megathreads” wanted to honestly assess why so many people believe wildly fantastical things about the election and the vaccine, they could’ve at least pointed to any number of credibility-destroying mistruths pushed by the Trumpist right.
Lawyers for both Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have separately insisted in court that their shows shouldn’t be viewed as fact-based — but both push anti-vaccine pablum to large and loyal audiences.
Trump-friendly media outlets like Newsmax, OAN, and American Thinker have all retracted content that implied or outright accused voting-technology companies of committing election fraud. Fox News cancelled Lou Dobbs’ show after one of those companies filed with a defamation suit over his claims of voter fraud.
And the Intellectual Dark Web mainstay Bret Weinstein has for months trumpeted the antiparasitic drug ivermectin — typically used for deworming livestock — as a prophylactic treatment for COVID. Weinstein’s ivermectin crusade has been so effective in online vaccine-skeptic circles that the FDA issued guidance against using the drug and said in a tweet: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
We could go on and on and on parsing the many lies of Trumpland over the past six years. And we could analyze the effect each small lie had in building widespread belief in Trump’s “Big Lie” and doubt in the COVID vaccine.
But that’s the point.
If you’re going to argue that “the media” is the reason so many people believe widely debunked fantasies about election fraud, and have also embraced irrational vaccine skepticism, then you can’t ignore the effect of relentless disinformation from right-leaning media — and from Trump himself.
As the former Breitbart leader and Trump senior advisor Steve Bannon put it in 2018: “”The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Whether it was defending the racist “Muslim ban” in 2017 or continuing to insist Trump rightfully won the 2020 election, flooding the zone with shit was always the Trumpist modus operandi.
Trump insisted for months before the election that it was “going to be one of the greatest frauds in history.” He told us all what he was going to do the whole time.
That’s why it’s simply ridiculous to argue that the initially credulous reporting of the 2019 Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax is the reason 147 Republicans voted against certifying the 2020 election. Much more likely is the fear these politicians had of crossing Trump, a cult of personality figure whose ardent followers brook no dissent among their ranks.
We could go on forever weighing who’s more at fault, a hubristic corporate news media that’s taken plenty of shots at its own feet, or an authoritarian nihilist and a sympathetic right-wing-media ecosystem that brags about “flooding the zone with shit.”
Ultimately, it’s a combination of both, though I’d put far more of the onus on Trump’s side, given that inundating people with bullshit is an openly deliberate strategy.
But you wouldn’t know there was any misinformation coming from the right if you read MartyrMade and Kilin’s so-called megathreads.
They claim to speak for the voiceless Trump supporter, unfairly bullied by pointy-headed elites who condescend to them.
And yet both threads essentially treat the people who believe in the Big Lie and don’t believe in the COVID vaccine as pure-of-heart simpletons with no agency, led astray by an elite corporate media that mocks all they stand for. In condemning the “elites” and “corporate media” condescending to “real people,” these two viral threads are actually condescending to the people they’re supposedly defending.
But just because these threads are larded with disingenuous narratives, doesn’t mean the “mainstream” media shouldn’t take heed of their messages’ resonance.
Partisan biases and institutional failures in the news media have indeed driven many people to seek out other sources, including from some personalities who built their entire brand on the questionable premise that they were “brave” enough to leave their corporate-media jobs, and are only now free to speak “the truth.”
But neither of the anti-media threads passes objective journalistic muster. They’re blinkered by the fog of partisan grievance and fail to address the largest sources of disinformation in our society.
Outlets such as Tablet, Greenwald’s Substack, and Tucker Carlson’s show uncritically signal-boost their content, lending a veneer of intellectual credibility to the ideas, however thin, and give the most dangerous conspiracy theorists cover to continue exploiting the public.
A lot of people want to be told it’s not their fault they believe in things that aren’t true, because the media’s failures warped their ability to distinguish between truth and lie. In excusing these behaviors and the bad actors who drive them — even under the guise of “just explaining things” — these threads give people tacit permission to continue placing their faith in Trumpist liars.
It’s why these “helpful” threads don’t deserve the legitimacy they’ve been bestowed. In condemning bad journalism, they provide cover for the con artists undermining democracy and public health.
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